Here's what fast food will cost with $17 an hour wages

When you've lost Slate ...

Pew map shows why a national $15 minimum wage is a terrible idea.

 

Yes.

Maybe.

No.

 

No, I'm simply saying that the working poor as a whole have benefited from every single minimum wage increase in American history (despite doomsday rhetoric) and that you have been unable or unwilling to refute that simple fact.

 

If you slashed the Bank of America CEO's compensation by 90 percent and spread the money among BofA's employees, they would realize a $50 raise. For the year.

A raise of $0.02 per hour.

Glad we got that settled.

 

Yes, and if you slashed the compensation of the top five executives at B of A by 90 percent (of $61 million), the 159,000 employees would receive a raise of $345 for the year. Now, to a member of upper management, that's nothing. To the $12/hour teller, it's a nice little bonus.

 

You're joking, right?

 

Um, I'm using BTE's example.

 

Yeah, and now you're up to a $0.14 raise per hour, before taxes. Sounds life changing.

 

YOU AND YOUR PALS SHUT YOUR DAMN MOUTH.

#quantitativeanalysismatters

 

The Slate article that our newest member linked to is quite good/interesting.

In our most expensive cities, it's a lack of affordable housing that is the problem, and this won't change that:

The problem with using the minimum wage to address an affordable housing shortage is that it does not, in fact, address an affordable housing shortage. It puts more money in people's pockets to pay rent. But, so long as the real estate market remains constrained, it's easy to imagine pay hikes getting absorbed into rent increases, as landlords realize that the whole metro area just got a raise.

And, of course government policies are directly related to the housing shortage in many cities. For example:

A new study by Chang-Tai Hsieh of the University of Chicago and Enrico Moretti of the University of California, Berkeley, calculates that the United States economy would be nearly 10 percent bigger if just three cities — New York, San Jose, and San Francisco — had loosened their constraints on the supply of housing and let more people in during the past few decades. Let that sink in: 10 percent bigger.

To get that number, the economists imagined a world in which those three cities had average land-use regulations, rather than the highly restrictive ones you see in practice. Over time, millions more workers would have flocked to those cities, becoming more productive and helping the whole economy grow. The average worker would be making $6,000 more a year than they are. Annual economic output would be more than $1 trillion higher as of 2009. We'd all be better off.

The High Cost of Expensive Townhouses -- NYMag

 

That $345 for a $12 an hour teller may be paying for a major car repair for, you know, to keep the car running so they can get to work at the bank instead of sitting at home collecting welfare. Or pay the heating bill during the wintertime, instead of having government heating assistance. Or paying some medical bills.

Maybe you should check your privilege.

 

It's not all coming in one pay check Baron. You're talking about $14.38 per paycheck, before takes.

It's an extra pack of smokes every two weeks. Or it's spent at the grocery store.